I read every review here before buying, and to be honest, you almost dissuaded me from my purchase. I figured that I would give it a shot. I spoke with Black Magic for a total of a few hours as well. They told me that I would need a 4 drive RAID 0 array to capture uncompressed HD, though I'm getting by just fine with a 3 drive array. Even then, I'm finding myself capturing in compressed anyways because uncompressed 720p from my Xbox 360 takes about 8GB per minute, where compressed is closer to 500MB per minute, and the quality is still rather good, though not as good. Once I got everything set up and configured correctly, it has been making very high quality videos. One gotcha that I found was that if you don't have the 360 configured to output in the exact same way that you have the Black Magic software configured, then you'll just get a black screen, but if it's all set up correctly, you'll be good to go. I'm using a non-supported motherboard in the family of supported ones. I think it supports the GIGABYTE UD5 and I'm using the UD3 with no problems. My biggest advice for people thinking about purchasing this device is to do your homework and make sure that you have the necessary PC hardware before spending the money. Call Black Magic too...they will tell you if your system is not going to work. I'm loving it so far.
I suspect that a lot of the other people who are complaining are people who ignored the "warning read this before installing" insert that came with the product informing you to update the NEC USB 3.0 drivers and where you can update them. This product will not work if your drivers are too old. I can understand why people were having problems with a product geared at those who are technically proficient.
The documentation that comes with the product is very good well illustrated, in color.
It's way better than those crappy HD-PVR type devices because it can capture from HDMI, and most importantly, LOSSLESSLY, instead of re-encoding everything on the fly by itself. Those HD-PVR boxes produce horrible encodes; but if you take video captured losslessly from a Design Intensity Shuttle and do a proper encode later with x264, your video will look excellent.
So I give this product a high rating, because despite being very picky on what hardware it works with, if you've got the proper equipment it works well. Right now this is hundreds of dollars cheaper than any other HDMI capture solution on the market.
Before I end this review let me give you the few "cons" I noticed:
-It doesn't support 1080p60. This is what the Xbox 360 and PS3 output when set to 1080p. So you have to set them to 1080i.
-You have to have their software or VirtualDub open for the device to pass through HDMI to the output port.
-It obeys the law meaning it doesn't work with HDCP-compliant signals. You'll have to order a separate piece of hardware to strip out the HDCP from the HDMI signal if you're using a device that puts HDCP on the signal. Xbox 360 outputs HDCP-free signal when playing games or at the dashboard. PS3 uses HDCP at all times so you have to use an HDCP stripper or use custom firmware and trick your PS3 into thinking it's a development unit which allows you to disable HDCP. Blu-ray players, cable DVRs, etc. will all likely use HDCP.
-Default lossless compression is very hard drive intensive requiring write speeds above 1 Gbps (120 MB/sec). If you want to capture video losslessly I recommend using VirtualDub instead of the default software with the modified huffyuv codec for HDYC. HuffyUV (HDYC mod) or AMV2MT both lower the maximum required speed of your hard drives from 1 Gbps+ to 300-500 Mbps (35-65 MB/sec). And yes, the video is still completely lossless (no quality lost.) Amazon is dumb and won't let you link to stuff in reviews so I hope you know how to use Google to find them.
Hardware tested on:
ASRock x58 Extreme3 motherboard
Windows 7 x64I ultimately returned this product. Please read whole review, it is everything I learned about the product.
System this was installed on:
EVGA EVGauge ECP V4 Intel P67 DDR2 1333 Extended ATX Motherboards 160-SB-E679-K2 with bios update 119.
Intel Core i7-2600 Processor 3.4GHz 8 MB Cache Socket LGA1155
2x Kingston Technology Hyper X 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 Non-ECC CL9 DIMM (Kit of 2) T1 Series KHX1600C9D3T1K2/8G
EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti DS Superclocked 1024 MB GDDR5 PCI-Express 2.0 Graphics Card 01G-P3-1567-KR
EVGA GeForce GT 520 Graphics Card Video Card 01G-P3-1526-KR
2x Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB SATA III 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Internal Desktop Hard Drive Bulk/OEM WD1002FAEX non-Raid on Sata3
4x Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB SATA III 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Internal Desktop Hard Drive WD2002FAEX in Raid0 array on Sata2
Some old DVD-RW Drive on HighPoint Rocket 620 2 SATA Port PCI-Express 2.0 x1 SATA 6Gb/s Controller
Windows 7 SP1 x64 Pro
Confirmed /working/ on a P67 after lots of frustration. Tried lots of driver versions and combinations, be sure to be using the latest drivers and firmwares of /everything/. The FTW model of the P67 uses a VIA USB3.0 chipset (this is the one I have). The SLI model seems to have an NEC chipset, while the mini model seems to have an ASMEDIA(?) chipset. So YMMV if you get one of the other ones.
Tested with a Xbox 360 Demo Kit (for Developers) and a Hannspree ST259MUB 25" 1080p 60Hz LCD HDTV.
Modes that I got working were:
HDMI (HDCP disabled on Devkit): NTSC (480i), 720p59.94 (720p), 1080i59.94 (1080i).
Component: NTSC (480i), 720p59.94 (720p), 1080i59.94 (1080i).
S-Video: NTSC (480i).
Composite: NTSC (480i).
The Shuttle does NOT support the required 1080p resolution for the 360, which is 1080p60 (not 1080p59.94, even though 59.94 seems more inline with other results).
A retail 360 can be used with this over HDMI, component, s-video, or composite. HDMI will work most of the time, unless a game turns on HDCP specifically. Most games do not. All movies do.
A retail PS3 can be used with this over component, composite, or s-video. HDMI rarely works with retail PS3 because they always have HDCP on. Supposedly an HD-FURY2 can help with this, I have not tested it yet.
A PS3 Devkit can used with this over HDMI, component, s-video, or compisite as HDCP can be disabled on them (also disabled movie playing).
A Retail Wii or Wii Devkit can be used with this over component, s-video, or composite.
Captures were confirmed to be in 8bit YUV as AVI, 10bit YUV as AVI, Motion JPEG as AVI, and 10bit RGB as DPX. Hardware does NOT claim to capture 4:4:4, only 4:2:2; I did not verify this. I had a dropped frame every so often, but this might have been cable noise. The software never complained about bandwidth being exceeded (which some people report as happening when they get dropped frames).
I had to reboot the machine any time I made a setting change either to what type of input to capture or what resolution/refresh rate for it to actually work. Resolutions were not autodetected from source, they must be manually set in software after setting it on source. If the device or cable were jostled, the software would typically corrupt the current capture file, crash/freeze, or BSOD. Sometimes changing a setting would crash/freeze or BSOD.
Pass-thru ONLY works when the BlackMagic Media Express software is running AND focused.
Pass-thru seems to always upscale/downscale output from selected input (I had selected S-video input and realized it was outputting on HDMI). Both pass-thru and Media Express preview both appear to have little to no delay/latency.
When playing back a capture through the Media Express software, it gets routed to the outputs of the device so that it is viewable on the TV plugged in.
Ultimately, I returned this product as it was too finicky and did not capture the resolution/refresh rate that I needed even though it was advertised as "Full HD".
Edited: Corrected X360 1080p refresh rate.I just finished building a system for video editing. Here is the break down
i7 2600k (overclocked to 4ghz)
16gb DDR3160000
4 5400 RPM 2tb Hitachi drives (red write speeds over 550mbps)
dual gtx 560 graphics cards
CS5.5 masters collection
Gygabyte z68 motherboard
According to their website my hardware falls under the "or better" category because i bought the latest versions of the suggested products.
I went through their instructions multiple times making sure i had the latest firmware for my USB 3.0 and all other
After going through multiple rounds of technical support taking me outside of my return window for this product I ended up with this information about my motherboard
"For now we are going to say they are not supported." Now I am left with this $200 piece of hardware that the seller will not take back, the manufacturer has left me with unsupported hardware and no solutions. I was going to go ahead and buy a PCI-E USB 3.0 card to use with this but the ones suggest by the manufacturer are either discontinued or as far as i can find no longer for sale. Their list of compatable hardware, however, has not been updated since the release of the product.
I read a lot of reviews for this product that seemed like relatively technically unskilled users having problems with hardware not being up to par. Well I have 4 years of video editing experience and before that 5 years of computer support and repair. I can tell you for a fact that this product has poor compatibility and unless you buy the exact hardware listed on their website and ignore the fact that this is now 2 generations old, you WILL NOT be able to get this to work.
Please, I beg of you. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. Buy the Matrox or the Motu box. Or maybe buy the PCI-E version of this product. Buy anything but this. I know its the cheapest and seemingly most versatile product for capturing HDMI on the market but I promise that the time you will spend pulling out your hair is well worth the extra money for a more expensive option.To start off, I am a software developer that is also a huge hardware hobbyist. So I am pretty tech knowledgable. This product is captures video at high resolution so it is understandable that you need to have a fast CPU. Basically your computer is getting 10GB+ a minute of raw video data. What is not understandable is that after so long the unit is still so temperamental when it comes to what USB 3 chipset and driver you use.
It is nearly at the point where it should be bundled with a PC. When I bought this a year ago, I had to buy another USB 3 card despite the fact that I already had USB 3 chipset. Then Blackmagic directed me to some French driver site to get the driver but it no longer existed at that link. Finally I found Intel had a board with this chipset and that driver worked. I understand there are differences between chipsets but the driver should handle that!
If you would like to use this with a laptop you better make sure that it is tested good with this unit as it is really impossible to know if it will work otherwise. My Sony Vaio Z does work with it. Otherwise you need to get the Pluggable technologies card for a desktop and now at least Pluggable is putting the driver on their site.
Still I would think now that USB 3 is not a new technology any more Blackmagic would have settled their driver issues. When it works it works wonderful but this level of specificity should not be the case from something that claims to be USB 3.0. Also do not upgrade to Windows 8, it will BSOD immediately with the Shuttle.
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